


heirs to the glimmering world

by captainoir



Category: Black Panther (2018), Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Cousin Incest, F/M, M/M, Other, Royal Affair AU, Threesomes, bucky didnt fall off the train, cold war au, erik summered with his cousins since he was a child and has a dual citizenship, remixed film and comic canon, shuri is shuri - loveable genius after my own heart, soundtrack: pink rabbits by the national, spies au, this is a two in one combo lmaoo, timeline nonexistent, vaguely post 1947 through mid fifties
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-18
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:20:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24258796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainoir/pseuds/captainoir
Summary: Nakia had always warned her about the violence of men’s affections since she was a young girl. It’s not something she would wish on anyone. It's fine if you liked the sort of thing, if you could weather it: the fury of their heartbreak, their unwillingness to let go until it was too late, the way they are determined to infiltrate your entire life.If you can’t handle it, stay clear, she had warned her.Shuri listened but never took it to heart.[or Princess Shuri wants the world and more]
Relationships: Erik Killmonger/Shuri, James "Bucky" Barnes/Erik Killmonger, James "Bucky" Barnes/Shuri
Comments: 6
Kudos: 19





	heirs to the glimmering world

Put an ocean and a river between everybody else

Between everything, yourself and home

The National

  
  
  
  


Erik walks back into her life four years later, without so much as a kimoyo call or fax to warn her of his return.

Shuri enters her lab and there he is, perched on her chief engineer’s desk, skimming through the specs of her latest project and regaling the enraptured blonde with his outlandish tales. He doesn’t notice her and she considers leaving the room, the building, the goddamn continent. But he turns, mid-story and blinks.

And then he says, “Hello Cuz.”

Shuri grabs her folders with shaking hands. “N’jadaka.”

And that is it, she understands: he is back.

“He is your cousin, right?”

Shuri laughs. It is unusually polite of Bucky to pretend that he isn’t aware of the story, down to its gory little details – the bright-eyed Wakandan princess who flew to America for love and success only to cross the ocean to England, alone, to assist in the Strategic Scientific Reserve. It shouldn't come as a surprise to her, Bucky is an accomplished spy among other things. “Yes, he is,” she says. “You got a problem with that, Sergeant?”

Bucky’s eyes are sharp in the dim light of the pub. Perhaps _polite_ was not the right word: he is wearing the particular smile he uses in interrogations and on conquests and senior officers – gentle, unhurried, biding, till he sinks sharp teeth into flesh. It was all part of the package and his appeal, she understands; that boyish laid-back charm. 

People tend to forget that he always draws blood.

“Can we talk about it later?” she says to forestall his line of questioning, tapping her cigarette against his empty teacup. “I feel a headache coming on.”

“Alright,” Bucky says. Then presses his knee against her thigh under the table.

“Alright,” Shuri repeats.

He won’t leave it at that for long, she knows, but he has granted her time, something he rarely offers others. They drink some more and at the end of the night he walks her home, twenty paces ahead of her security detail, their hands brushing along the way. He presses a kiss to the corner of her mouth when they reach her flat, like always, and she watches him walk away, his form gradually enveloped by the dark.

After an impromptu sparring session, they share a cigarette and he looks around her flat with a judgy silence. It is small and the walls are bare, smaller than the place they had together in New York and a hovel in comparison to their chambers back home.

She loves it.

“I remember you used to love colour and life. This shit is depressing as hell.”

She doesn’t give him the reaction he expects: three years ago she would have worn her indignation and anger on her face. She supposes that she is finally growing up. It makes her unbearably sad.

“Things change.”

His hand snakes under her waistband and with unerring aim, presses his fingers just where she likes it in one smooth movement. Something within her unfurls like a flower.

“And somethings don’t, cousin,” he says hotly into her ear, the gold of his capped fangs catching the fading dusk light. She sighs and lies back on the carpet, legs falling open. She thinks about the day he left, remembers staring at the door he had slammed shut, rattling the framed photos and the rage and heartbreak that threatened to choke her. If she concentrates hard enough, she can still feel all those things.

“I suppose,” she says, and then he kisses her and well she doesn’t say much after that.

Her father had wanted her to be conventional and then he had wanted her to marry a traditionalist as an act of service to her nation. Her mother wanted her to be filial and cautious with her heart. Some days she recalls her voice saying, _love and independence are antithetical to people like us. Choose one and let go of the other._

Her brother had wanted her to be safe above all else.

Shuri had no intention of being anything of the sort and so, without meaning to, broke all of their hearts. The affair and the dissolution of the engagement were contained within the family and their departure was dry-eyed and swift.

T’challa had crushed her in his embrace and wished her happiness. He had walked past Erik who stood smiling and defiant, without a glance. Erik wore that smile as the RFT phased through the holographic shield and it didn’t disappear until they were over the Indian Ocean.

Shuri was too awestruck by her newfound freedom and the whole world to consider what life without her family would look like. She had the structure of it in her head: a world with no walls, no form, nothing but long stretches of open road and the horizon and them.

Bucky had informed her once – and she’d seen him – there were times it’s been made clear to her that although he loves her in a deep and abiding manner, he would not deny himself the pleasure of others' company. Women and men alike – it was rare enough that he had time to entertain anything but his work. The rest he said, is just _surplus_

And Erik was Erik – hacking through the world with no consideration for anyone or anything. He never apologized for leaving her to go off on his War Dog assignment. He calls her on slow rainy nights and sometimes she is in and sometimes she is at the lab with Bucky. He invites himself over when she is in, expensive bottles of wine and extravagant food in each hand and they eat in her tiny kitchen.

Sometimes they talk. Sometimes they spar. Sometimes they reverse engineer primitive western technology and upgrade their weapons design to her satisfaction.

Sometimes they have sex.

It shocks her, still.

She has a front row seat and is forced to bear witness. It happens in increments: their slow violent courtship, going head to head in asinine debates in front of the entire office, fighting over her in insidious ways. It’s in the cups of coffee and sweets on her work table, the way they accost her at work, at the pub and even her flat. One night Erik grabs Bucky by the shoulder and takes him for a Lads Night Out, that’s what he calls it, even if it is just the two of them and the next morning, Shuri sees it despite his valiant efforts to cover it up, the brand on Bucky’s neck. She could recognize it anywhere.

He avoids her, shifting his gaze whenever she is in the vicinity and broods for a week, chain smoking until his fingers are black before shipping out with the Howling Commandos for a month without so much as a goodbye.

She hates how cyclical her life is becoming.

Nakia had always warned her about the violence of men’s affections since she was a young girl. It’s not something she would wish on anyone, she had told her. It's fine if you liked the sort of thing, if you could weather it: the fury of their heartbreak, their unwillingness to let go until it was too late, the way they are determined to infiltrate your entire life.

If you can’t handle it, stay clear, she had warned her.

Shuri had listened but never took it to heart. It made sense that Nakia would think so – she was a beauty and from a family of great standing. Men were constantly vying for her attention, the Crown Prince included. Shuri was certain she would never have to suffer through that. It was beyond the scope of her imagination, to love and be loved with such fervor. It wasn’t a question of self-esteem; she was too practical and unromantic. Her social life was limited to the palace and the laboratory. Her status as the princess of Wakanda made it so no one could ever truly approach her without ceremony and form and royal pomp.

And then it happened, twice. 

About Bucky, Nakia says, “He sounds like a keeper.’

“Are you sure?” Shuri imagines Nakia rolling her eyes wherever she is. She suspects somewhere in South American, posing as a Nigerian heiress. “It doesn’t matter anyway.”

“Why the hell not? He loves you. You said so yourself.’

“He does. But – “ She doesn’t remember clearly. They always got sentimental when drinks were involved. “I might have rebuffed him once or twice early on when I thought it didn’t mean much. And he thinks I’m far too young. He is always bringing attention to it. I guess some men are content to love from afar.”

Nakia huffs down the phone lines. She wishes they could talk face-to-face, or at least through the Kimoyo beads but they can't risk it.

“But not Erik.” There is a nasty tone to her voice: she never liked Erik, not even in childhood. Nakia found his intensity and lazy insolence off-putting and always made a point to call him by his American name. At their secret wedding ceremony, she had stood before them to bear witness, dressed in her tribal regalia and Shuri ignored the warning in her eyes. _You’re making a big mistake,_ they had said.

“That’s history.”

“Is it now?”

Nakia has always been too good at reading her than she ever gave her credit for.

“According to the papers and the ancestors and Bast, yes it is.” She had sent the divorce papers to her father two years after he left without a trace. She didn’t want to leave anything to chance. She was so angry and bitter and wanted their family to know. It shocked her cold when she came home to a message on the kimoyo from T’challa informing her that Njadaka had signed them with no hesitation. _Fuck you_ she had thought, still half mad with grief. _I don’t need him._

A week later she chartered a private jet and accepted Agent Carter’s offer to head the weapons design group of SSR in London.

“Is he giving you any grief? Aside from pissing on your suitor and marking you both?”

Shuri laughs despite herself and is seized with a fierce longing for home. “I can handle myself, you know. I’m not a little girl anymore.”

She can hear the smile in Nakia’s voice. “Tell that to your brother. He has been impossible these past years. Maybe the sight of you will get him off my back.”

“You’re too cruel. Stop playing hard to get and make an honest man out of him already.”

Nakia laughs, a happy trill. “I like making him work for it.” A pause. “You should come home. Or at least drop by for a visit. We all miss you terribly.”

“I’ll consider it,” she tells her. She hasn’t returned home in five years. She doesn’t know how to anymore.

“That’s all I ask. Bast, can you believe Okoye settled for W’kabi? Like of all people –” and she is off, lost to the details, of familiar names and faces. And Shuri tunes out the words and focuses on the sound of her voice instead, the lilting music of it, dripping Wakandan sunshine into her ears.

They make a great team, her and Bucky. He is always willing to workshop with her and test out her creations in the field, against protocol or even common sense. He is an accomplished soldier, a brilliant strategist and a skilled marksman, she has come to learn. His input has become invaluable to her and on more than a few occasions, instrumental in the creative process. He has an appetite for science she appreciates. They work together seamlessly until Erik upsets the fragile equilibrium they had painstakingly fine-tuned in the wake of a tumultuous start.

At the start, they had hated each other.

They met at Peggy’s wedding in New York and he was the best man to the groom. Shuri resented being there and only attended to convey T’challa’s regret for skipping out on an old university friend. She was heart sore and angry from the divorce and not in the mood to celebrate love and matrimony. She didn't know a single soul apart from the bride and everyone looked at her a bit askance, Bucky included. 

She had thought him dull and uncompromising, with his unshaven face and brooding looks. He had thought her whimsical, self-important and entitled. She overheard him tell his date that this was no place for prissy princesses who lived ensconced in their ivory towers when good men and women gave their lives to the war. The red-head wrapped around him had made a passing comment about her wardrobe – a modest silk dress by Shuri’s standards – and how she was flaunting her wealth. It smarts still; their assessment of her and the venom which they voiced it with, when she remembers it.

They had another awkward run-in by the lift, two months later in the SSR base in London. Both of them were cooly polite with each other until it was made clear to them that they were expected to work together. Shuri couldn’t say how they became friends after that: only that she knows him well enough to imagine how it might have gone. He might have decided to apologize late one night, when they were the last people in the entire building, testing out the vibranium sonic guns. He might have put an overly sweetened coffee on her work station the next morning, foregoing his sugar rations. He might have brought her little souvenirs and bonbons from across the channel. She learned it then: that he was not a man that gave up easily.

He told her stories about his childhood and of the war on silent restless nights, when they were buzzing with too much energy and went out to drink with her staff and his men until the early mornings. He told her about his time as POW, of being tortured and forced to labour for Hydra, in chains. She never said she was sorry because those were empty platitudes so she said nothing at all. He had been right about her: she was a sheltered spoiled child.

Instead she told him about Wakandan sunsets, of the great green veldt, of the Warrior Falls and of Bast and Sekhmet. He leaned in too close, their bodies touching and listened with an enraptured face.

She loved him most then.

Other times, like now, he sits across from her and deposits an earpiece into her hand that needs mending and watches her work.

“Why did you marry him?”

It startles her. “I thought you were still pretending you didn’t know?”

He gave her a conspiratorial smile.“I got bored. And any half-way decent intelligence officer can dig it up. You left a paper trail. It wasn't exactly discreet.”

 _And you care too much,_ she doesn’t say.

“He asked me.”

He frowns. “Wouldn’t have thought that was a good enough reason for you.”

Suddenly she is furious with him: with his coyness, his inability to commit, how slighted he has been acting since Erik's arrival.

“Yeah well maybe you don’t know me as well as you thought.”

He snatches up the parting words as he leaves. “I have been thinking the same.”

“I do know you,” he says after he has kissed her breath away, crowding her against the brick wall. The air is cold as glass and her mouth sting from the burn of his stubble. They have both left their coats inside the pub and her little dress isn’t practical. “I can’t. But it doesn’t mean I don’t know you.”

He moves away to stand by her side, takes a pack from his pocket and shakes a cigarette out into his hand. He offers her one and she takes it. The door slams open, patrons and voices and music spilling out into the night. Bucky presses himself closer – she can feel the gun against her hip. He has been promising to take her dancing for almost a year and all he managed was one lousy twirl, before pressing a kiss to the side of her neck and then to her lips and then dragging her out the backdoor.

Shuri squints at him. “Why’s that?”

He is fumbling with his Zippo, drunker than he usually lets himself get. She reaches for it, steps between his legs and lights it for him. She remembers Erik telling her once, shortly after her seventeenth birthday and he caught her in her lab, trying and failing to light a cigarette – that in some countries lighting a cigarette for a woman meant you wanted to sleep with them. It had thrilled her when he plucked the Zippo from her fingers and lit it.

Bucky blinks, dazed. “Uh, thanks, kid.”

She wonders if Bucky knows about this custom or if he would find the whole thing silly. She hates it when he calls her that. _Kid_.

“You were saying?”

“I just meant I have reasons for why I do what I do.”

“Of course you do.” It comes out sounding bitter even to her ears. “I’m too young. You’re too old. Your job is dangerous. It’s not professional. You’re far too beneath my station. Have I covered them all?”

She rolls her cigarette between her fingers and watches him from the corner of her eyes. He is searching for something but nothing is coming to him, she can tell.

And then after a while, “You know I love you.” 

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. I know. Bast I am the smartest person you will ever meet. Of course I know you love me.”

He watches her. “Right. Of course.” He has a nasty tendency of forgetting who she is sometimes – that she wasn’t just a princess or a colleague or the young girl he has begrudgingly fallen for - always waiting in the shadows with her smiles and attentions until he is ready to focus on her. It’s insulting.

“I have to tell you something.”

“Ok.”

He falls quiet, smoking to buy himself time, to temper his nerves.

“You slept with Erik.”

He tenses beside her. He is smart enough not to ask her how she knew and instead says, “And it doesn’t bother you?”

“Why should it?” Shuri shrugs, aiming for nonchalance and falling short. “He is single and free to do what he wants, with whom he wants. So are you. So am I.”

She lights her cigarette for something to do. She hates how mature she is being about the whole situation. She wants to kick off, to stomp her foot and demand his full undivided love. She is selfish, she knows, but she wants it all: Erik’s intensity, Bucky’s unwavering devotion. She has always wanted everything. Back when he could stand the sight of her, her Baba would laugh and say that wanting too much was a sign of youth. _The first sign of growing up,_ he’d said, _is you can’t always get what you want. You have to give up more than you can keep_. She didn’t understand it then. Understands it less now.

“I thought you were sleeping together?” Bucky asks with a tight voice.

“Sometimes.”

He hums and blows plumes of smoke into the frigid night air. “How very… _progressive_ of you.”

He smiles at her: an olive branch.

“Of course,” she sniffs haughtily. “Wakanda is a far more enlightened place than most of the world.”

“So you keep telling me.”

Then with hesitating, clumsy seduction, she tangles their cold fingers together, rubs her thumb over his knuckles, “I will take you home with me someday.”

When she looks over at him, Bucky’s eyes are dark.

Well, she decides then and there, time wasn’t going to be a problem for her. She would stay forever young.

“I think The Atlanteans are up to something,” Erik tells her in lieu of a greeting. He is perched on her desk, facing the door. He grabs her by the waist, pulling her close as soon as she enters the office. “There’s been some chatter from our operatives worldwide.”

Shuri tries to break away but gives up too easily.

“Namor speaks of waging war against us once a year, every year,” she tells him. “Nothing will come out of it.” It’s barely eight in the morning and Shuri is tired, wrung to the bone. “He is not as stupid as he looks. He wouldn’t risk the tenuous peace between our nations. He has been angling for an alliance for years.”

Erik stands up to his full height, dragging his body against hers and she shivers. She prays to Bast none of her lab rats arrive early to witness Erik’s brand of lewdness.

His glasses slide down the bridge of his nose and something inside her softens toward him– she has always loved how young they rendered him, how they softened his features, hid the hard gleam in his eyes.

“I still gotta take this seriously.” He presses their foreheads together. “If anything were to happen to our folks … even if they hate us….I “ he starts and stops. She has known this since she was a child: they have always had the same hunger for escape within them, and nothing to escape from. They love their country and their family, even in their anger.

“You know I went there,” Erik says. “After you sent our divorce papers to our King. That was a vindictive move, princess.”

She ignores the bait. “How was dear ol’ Namor? Still a covetous prick?”

His grin was cat-like. “He said to tell you that his offer still stands.”

“I’d rather greet Bast in the great veldt beyond than take up with him.”

“Hmm. I wouldn’t be so quick to shoot it down. It’s not home but Atlantis is nothing to snub your nose at.” He flicks her nose playfully. “Queen Shuri of Atlantis has a nice ring to it.”

“Yeah, might as well kill Baba and T’challa with my bare hands and gift-wrap Wakanda for him.”

“You know I would never let that happen to us.”

“Oh great, you will be there.”

“Of course,” he says, mock offended.

“Of course,” she repeats drolly.

He hooks a hand around her neck and kisses her, rough and hard, licking her open and smearing her lipstick.

“Anyways, I thought I should compare notes with our American Liaison just in case. The Brits have been too tight-lipped, the fuckers,” he says. “Besides, the secretaries might be more forthcoming with their bosses’ secrets at the sight of your pretty boy’s pearly whites.”

“You’re going to get caught one of these days” she warns him. “They will kill you in your sleep.”

He laughs, says, ”I welcome the challenge,” and saunters out of the office.

She catches a glimpse of Bucky’s retreating form through the glass walls, hurrying down the hall and Erik racing to catch up with him.

She gets the foreboding sense that they are all hurtling towards ruin. 

  
  
  


Shuri goes to New York to attend and represent Wakanda at the UN General assembly. T’challa had requested it on the back channel. “Father has taken ill quite suddenly. I need you to hold the fort for a few days and we will relieve you.”

She couldn't have refused them even if she wanted to.The thought of sitting through weeks of meetings and courtesy and political discourse on the world stage drained her soul. Especially when the truth of Wakanda was hidden. It may have been T’challa asking but she heard the royal edict loud and clear. It was an offer for reconciliation, she knows. Her Baba reaching out in his reserved kingly way.

Erik and Bucky come with her. _Just in case_ , they say. Bucky accompanies them because he has missed home. “I’ve got nothing to do in dreary London.” She allows them both their lies, espionage is all about deception, blatant or otherwise.

“New York,” Bucky groans at the airport, sucking on his seventh cigarette of the day. He looks at her and smiles. “New York, New York!”

When their royal escorts arrive, they snap back into old habits. They make a curious trio: Erik with his body open, slouching and louche, Bucky erect with military precision and Shuri almost gaudy in her regality. More than once Shuri has to stop herself from hooking her arm into theirs.

At the hotel, Bucky gestures vaguely at the doors as the bell boys take care of their luggage. “I’m just gonna….my family, they are expecting. I will see …” he doesn't wait for them to respond before disappearing into a busy street.

Erik laughs. “I really don't know what you see in that boy of yours.”

“He is not you,” she tells him bluntly.

He wraps an arm around her shoulders and bites her cheek playfully, attracting reproachful looks from the doorman and their guards. “Oh how you wish,” Erik says and drags her to the reception.

  
  
  


“There’s talk,” Bucky says a week later, looking out the window of her hotel room. He is strangely subdued. “Something is brewing.”

“Care to share?” Erik drawls from her bed, watching her with hooded eyes as she sifts through her closet for her outfit the following day. 

“There’s a lot of movements. More than usual. I can’t see if or how Atlantis comes into the picture but there have been rumblings across the channel.” Bucky turns to her. “I think I should go. Be there for when it happens.”

“ _If_ it happens at all,” she corrects him. She doesn't understand spies. She thinks it would drive her mad, all the half-truths and forked realities. “Will it be dangerous, do you think?”

“No,” he says, by which he means, _of course_. It sets her teeth on edge.

“Oh don't be so glum,” Erik tells her with a smile. “I will accompany him. Keep him out of trouble. Make sure Namor doesn't feed him to his pet sharks for a lark.”

Something inside her lurches at the thought - the two of them off to where she can’t reach them. She is seized by an inexplicable urge to tie them to her, force them to retire from service and run back home, behind the holographic shield and palace walls and the Dora, where nothing could touch them.

She throws her clothes back into the closet, giving up and says, “You will probably goad Namor into separating both of your heads from your necks and I will get them gift wrapped in my post.”

Erik cackles, comes up behind her and wraps himself around her. He whispers, “Don't worry cousin. I will keep your little pet alive.”

  
  
  


They take her dancing the night before the second week of sessions. “For your nerves,” Bucky explains. There’s a live jazz band playing at the bar and a woman crooning in Spanish, her hair glittered and wild.

“A dance, wife?”

Erik forcefully pulls her towards him just as Bucky makes an aborted movement towards her. She reaches out behind her, grabs his hand and says,”You coming?”

Liquid courage.

They spin her and dip her, one after the other. She is dizzy and breathless when Bucky kisses her thoroughly only to fall back into Erik who chases after the taste in her mouth with viciousness. They twirl her around until she forgets who is who in the dark, their arms strong, their lips slippery and wet.

She is laughing as they head back to the hotel, already intertwined. Bucky leans close when they drive past the UN building and says, “Imagine if all the delegates knew how you spent the night before your big day. Working so diligently through the night, so _thoroughly_ it's a wonder you can even stand for your fifteen minutes,” and she laughs harder. She is still giggling into his mouth when Erik does a quick security check before pulling them in impatiently and all three tumble into bed. They crawl over her, Erik cradling her head with uncharacteristic softness as Bucky kisses her stomach, her hips, then down where she needs it most.

And when she flies apart, threatening to break into a million tiny pieces, they hold her together, between them, like borders.

  
  
  


Later when she startles awake in the early hours of the morning, Bucky is by the window again, the one that overlooks the UN. She goes to wrap her arms around his waist. He doesn't move. He has grown gaunt and sharp in the last few months. He is still more handsome than he has any right to be but she worries.

When he speaks, his voice is groggy and low. “I will pick you up, tomorrow. Afterwards.”

She is too warm and sleepy to ask, _after what_. The sessions she supposes. “You don’t have to.”

“I want to. I will.”

There’s an intensity to him that is foreign, much too similar to Erik’s and it frightens her a little. He doesn't wear it as well. She holds his face between her hands and peers into his eyes. He seems troubled and guarded. “You can tell me anything, you know.”

He presses a kiss to her wrist. Once.Twice. Thrice, before pulling her into a suffocating embrace. She can't see his face like this, cheek pressed to his chest. 

“It’s going to be fine, princess. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

They don’t go back to sleep.

  
  
  


She will never forget it, she will think afterwards - aboard the RFT on their way to Wakanda, the coffin in front of her - the moment when the building fell and the earth shattered beneath her feet. Of being pinned to the ground, the three of them silent with shock, the smoke blurring her vision, the debris clogging her airways and the ringing in her ears…oh the ringing.

It’s one of those horrific moments that sticks to a person, sinks deep into their memories and supplants others - happier ones, everything that had led up to that point and everything after. Thinking back, she wasn’t nearly as scared as she should have been. She almost rushed inside to get to Baba and T’challa but Erik wouldn’t let her. And when he emerged carrying their father’s limp body, she had thought, hysterically, that she should drop to her knees and address her brother as His Grace.

It’s only now when they are sitting across from each other on the plane, their cheeks equally tear-stained that she wonders why Erik isn't on the plane with her.

“N’Jadaka is staying back to catch the culprit,” her brother explains in a tired hollow voice.

“And James?”

She knows, before she asked, deep in her bones, what her brother and Okoye and the aides refuse to speak out loud. What she is refusing to believe. She remembers him as he was the night before, solemn and aloof one moment and doting and loving the next, flipping moods with her every look.

 _Know that I love you_ , he whispered as he held her on the dance-floor, their hips swinging in time.

T’challa turns away when her face crumbles, offering her this small kindness.

Erik is going to kill him, she is sure of it. Horrifically. As sure as he killed her father and countless others

Bast, she thinks, we really have ruined each other.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> so...huzzah! i finally got off my arse and wrote something for this amazing ship. and in time for the May Writing Challenge, will you look at that. i dont know what this mess is but i dedicate it to the winterprincess fandom, and especially to your-girl-is-lovely on tumblr who through the years, has encouraged me. 
> 
> enjoy


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